Earlier this decade, Jeff Sharlet moved in with a group of men in a Christian community called Ivanwald. Together, they lived in a nondescript house in suburban Washington, DC, that was run by a group that called itself the Family. On the surface, the place seemed harmless enough—blending the camaraderie of segregated male domains (the locker room, the frat house) with more sober elements of spiritual retreat (Bible study, rigid self-denial, and structured work). Sharlet, who is the coauthor of a book on fringe American religious experience, Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible (2004), writes, “I had no thought of

A word of advice: Do not allow Sharon Weinberger and Nathan Hodge to plan your vacation, unless touring missile silos in the middle of Wyoming is your idea of a good time. Better to go to the beach and bring along A Nuclear Family Vacation, their entertaining travelogue-cum–history of the American nuclear-weapons industry (and its analogues in central Asia and Iran). Better still, read their book at summer’s end; though frequently amusing, A Nuclear Family Vacation is likely to dampen one’s spirits, as discussions of nuclear war will often do.

Debbie Drechsler’s semiautobiographical Daddy’s Girl first ran as a series of strips in the New York Press in the early 90s. Published in book form in 1995, the graphic novel was nominated for an Ignatz Award but was sold only in comic-book stores and fell out of print. Its reissue in hardcover speaks to the lasting quality of the material and should act as a reminder that, despite the large number of similar memoirs and graphic novels published in recent years, the original strip was groundbreaking in its frank depiction of sexual abuse.

For a true music nerd, there is nothing more satisfying than listening to a piece of music, parsing out its samples, and hunting for the albums on which those sounds originally appeared. But while many fans view sampling as breathing new life into long-forgotten songs, others, of course, see it as infringement. Issues of appropriation—audio and otherwise—pervade Sound Unbound, a new anthology on digital music and culture edited by conceptual artist and musician Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid).

Vivian Gornick has always been an impassioned reader, writer, and inhabitant of her own life, holding firmly to the vastly unmodish notion that novels, memoirs, and essays are not just ironic, parsable constructs but have the power to help us locate, define, and even redeem ourselves. Gornick believes, that is, in the transcendent effect of literature, whether it be a novel by Virginia Woolf, a memoir by Edmund Gosse, or an essay by Seymour Krim—an effect made possible by dint of a book’s “clarity of thought” (an oft-repeated phrase of hers) rather than its sheer emotional power. Indeed, to her

In 1973, writing in the introduction to her indispensable compendium, Work 1961–73, Yvonne Rainer admits, “I find myself greedy. . . . So here I am, in a sense, trying to ‘replace’ my performances with a book, greedily pushing language to clarify what already was clear in other terms.” In her ambitious drive to dissect the historical conventions of performance over the past four-plus decades, Rainer has utilized a remarkable variety of media. And while dance and film have been her primary concerns, the written word has played a pivotal role, not simply as a means of clarification but as

He had rarely paused to consider matters of class; as a pervert he was above such vulgar forms of definition. —Peter Jinks, Hallam Foe Making drastic changes to a novel while adapting it for the screen is one thing, but doing so when the novelist is a close friend can induce new levels of anxiety. Scottish director David Mackenzie found himself in that situation when he decided to tackle Peter Jinks’s acclaimed Hallam Foe, an offbeat story about a young Peeping Tom’s decidedly odd journey to self-knowledge. Mackenzie and Jinks had known each other since sharing “a lovely big